I watched Sam Allardyce’s podcast so you don’t have to - Square Ball 2/6/23

DESTROY AND EXIT

Written by: Rob Conlon

The news cycle is a bastard. I opened Sam Allardyce’s return to the No Tippy Tappy Football podcast on Thursday morning with a pang of self-loathing. I needed to prepare myself before starting to watch the video, so I briefly checked Twitter just as The Athletic broke their story that Andrea Radrizzani had tried to use Elland Road to secure a bank loan that would help him buy Sampdoria. Two hours later, I still hadn’t clicked play, stuck in a loop of refreshing Twitter and WACCOE desperately hoping for another update on Leeds United’s latest takeover fiasco — just like the good ol’ days.

If Allardyce was hoping Leeds was an opportunity to return to relevance, he needed more than four games, and he needed a club where the manager was the big story rather than the latest in a series of interim inconveniences. Actually, that should be head coach, not manager. “Another scenario that’s happened in the game today, manager doesn’t seem to be a word anybody wants to use anymore,” Allardyce says at the beginning, immediately falling into the parody of the man out of time he tries to rail against. Later in the podcast, there’s a return to his gripe against the metric system we heard during one of his press conferences at Leeds. “Two goals at West Ham were less than an inch offside, or should I say fifteen millimetres now, because hardly anybody knows what inches and feet are.”

At Leeds, Allardyce had hinted he would say how he really felt about the problems at the club once the season finished. His post-match press conferences rarely veered beyond ‘the players aren’t good enough’. Lo and behold, speaking opposite Tim Sherwood doesn’t provide much more insight — the players worked hard and were committed, he says, they just weren’t good enough under the pressure of a relegation battle:

“I was seeing balls go under players’ feet on Sunday and going, ‘Oh wow, that can only be pressure.’ Because on the training ground, it never happened. It was fluid. It was moved, running the right areas, but then come the day of the game it went under the foot or the pass went astray or the ball bounced off them. And then you’re looking and thinking, well that can only be the pressure of the day that they can’t actually handle unfortunately.”

The similarities between Allardyce and Jesse Marsch have already been pointed out. Where Allardyce is talking about pressure, Marsch was talking about stress, yet neither came up with a solution to help Leeds play better in a highly pressured and stressful situation. Allardyce is full of praise for his coaches: Robbie Keane was “concentrating on the strikers, because goals were a rarity”; Karl Robinson’s focus was on “midfield, tactics”; and Allardyce looked after “team play”. Which begs the question, was anyone organising the defence beyond telling Max Wöber to stay on his feet?

“Newcastle was there for the taking and we failed because of our own frailties. I think that that win would have kept us safe but because we threw that away it went on and on and on and probably through most of the season when you look back that’s been the fault — I think they conceded nearly eighty goals.”

Twelve of which were conceded in four games under Allardyce. For all the talk that he was the man to fix the defence and keep clean sheets, Leeds conceded at least two goals in each of his four matches in charge, which isn’t a great look when you’re picking six defenders for a must-win final game of the season, leaving the chances you create to be wasted by Robin Koch.

“The ultimate real disappointment, I’d have to say, after all the hard work we did, was Sunday’s match and the escalation of basic errors at critical moments in the game, which made it look really embarrassing. Which was really sad because in between that there was 21 shots at goal, but on target only two. So you could see the amount of play we had but that means nothing to the fans and to the press and everybody else because you’ve got hammered 4-1.”

Which is followed by an excuse straight out of Frank Lampard’s handbook:

“Apart from the last goal, all three goals were mistakes more than Tottenham’s great play.”

It was your job to help eradicate those mistakes, Sam. And I’d probably watch the fourth goal back, too.

Not all the players are rubbish though. When asked which three Leeds players he’d like to work with again if given the opportunity, he replies:

“Robin Koch I thought was great. Really, really determined. Luke Ayling — dedicated, loves the football club, I think he knows everything that he wants to be. And I think that Jack Harrison’s commitment to Leeds United is excellent. There are some good players there, there’s no doubt about that, but collectively they weren’t good enough in the Premier League.”

Allardyce maintains he’d have had a better chance of keeping Leeds up if he had been given the job when the club appointed Javi Gracia, who he refers to only as “Garcia”:

“Look at what happened with Roy [Hodgson] at Crystal Palace. Unbelievable. A new voice and a different voice and a different way of coaching. Turn that around extremely quickly. But it isn’t really about that. It’s just a change of manager and all the players going out to try and prove themselves they can play for the new manager. It’s only what you do after that to sustain him.”

But if it only takes a change of manager and a new voice to inspire the immediate turnaround at Palace (and those initial few weeks at Leeds under Gracia), why could he only muster a point from four games?

Part of me enjoyed listening to Allardyce’s press conferences at Leeds. There were moments that made me cringe, but also occasions when he was funny or made interesting points. In his final pre-match press conference, before the Spurs game, he started talking about how being back in a job had made him feel young again. While describing his daily routine when he was out of work, he appeared doleful, as if realising this was what he was a going to shortly be going back to:

“Dealing with young players again, it obviously keeps you young. I love thinking about what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do, instead of wondering whether I’m going to have a cup of tea and a poached egg on toast and walk around the reservoir and watch whatever’s on Netflix and walk around the reservoir again. It’s pretty goddamn boring.”

Having to accept your time has passed and it’s another generation’s turn is difficult enough for anyone, let alone those who have become accustomed to the buzz of working in elite sport. But it’s also a fact of life. He probably has a point when he says people are overcomplicating football, laughing at terminology like ‘low block’ and ‘false nine’ with Sherwood, but he’s also the manager who is proud of being one of the first to embrace data, sports science, and psychology. In his first press conference as Leeds boss, he sounded like someone who has spent the last two years bored out of his brains in front of the TV:

“There’s two things in the game. There’s ideas and knowledge. Then there’s staying ahead of the game, which is what I did in the early 2000s. Nothing much has changed.”

The problem is football has changed, and even teams as technically brilliant as Manchester City know how to deal with Weston McKennie’s long throws.

“If there’s one thing I can do better than Man City it’s win the ball back in knockdown areas or shut them off on throw-ins and win it back or win the knockdowns and plan to do that. This is only one of the few things that we can do better than Manchester City, but unfortunately Manchester City are really good at those as well and that’s why they’re the best.”

As much as I have some sympathy for Allardyce, I’m relieved he won’t be coaching Leeds next season. When discussing whether he could stay at the club, I shuddered at his Neil Warnock hubris of asking, “Have I got a chance to get promoted by that squad?” The news cycle meant that question wasn’t relevant for long, although now it has been confirmed he won’t be staying, perhaps he’ll have some more revealing things to say next week.